Microscopy with Coherent X-Rays: Following Physical and Chemical processes on the Nanoscale

Christian Schroer (DESY | PETRA III Physik)
Seminar room 3, 15:00

A key strength of microscopy with x-rays is to image the inside of an object without destructive sample preparation. In this way physical and chemical processes can be followed in-situ or under working conditions inside special sample environments, such as a chemical reactor. But despite the short wavelength of x-rays that lies in the range of interatomic distances, it is not possible today of resolve single atoms. This is mainly due to the weak interaction of x-rays with matter that limits the numerical aperture of x-ray optics and thus the spatial resolution in the x-ray microscope. One solution to overcome this limitation is to avoid imaging optics altogether and scan the sample with a small coherent x-ray beam, capture the scattered light from the sample at each scan point with an area detector, and use these data to numerically reconstruct the sample. Following this scheme, a route to sub-nanometer resolution in x-ray microscopy is discussed.

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Microscopy with Coherent X-Rays